New York Attorney General Letitia James sued the operator of the Zelle payments network on Wednesday, alleging it enabled fraud by allowing scammers to steal over $1 billion from users between 2017 and 2023.

James' office said in a press release that its investigation found that Early Warning Services, the owner and designer of the peer-to-peer money transfer company, designed Zelle "without critical safety features." The release noted that the lawsuit against EWS follows a similar one dropped by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in March.

"EWS knew from the beginning that key features of the Zelle network made it uniquely susceptible to fraud, and yet it failed to adopt basic safeguards to address these glaring flaws or enforce any meaningful anti-fraud rules on its partner

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